Car dealer’s son arrested in Cuba

Q: Wasn’t there a car dealer named Austin Young who was arrested in Cuba?

A: At first glance, Indiana native Austin Young Jr. didn’t give the idea he was the Indiana Jones type. But he was.

The son of wealthy General Motors executive Austin Young Sr., who’d retired to Palm Beach and operated a dealership by the same name in Lake Worth, young Austin Young was sent away to military school at age 7. He claimed he flew for the Royal Air Force and the Flying Tigers in World War II, and reportedly served in the U.S. Air Force in Korea, although that was later discounted. He flew for airlines in Haiti and reportedly tried to start one himself.

But it was after Fidel Castro seized control of Cuba in the early hours of Jan. 1, 1959, that Young, then 39, found his calling as a soldier of fortune and counter-revolutionary.

“You know how you’d feel when you’re going around a turn with three Ferraris on your tail?” he reportedly said at the time. “It’s like that in Cuba. Excitement.”

In March 1959, Young was arrested for trying to smuggle Cubans out of the country and holding $1,600 in unaccounted pesos.

He was held for five months in the La Cabana prison fortress, across the bay from Havana. Palm Beach Post editor George Hathaway, who’d flown to Cuba for a brief interview, reported Young said he hadn’t been mistreated but that the food was so bad, “even the Cubans won’t eat it.”

Young was suddenly released one midnight in August and told never to return to the island. But within a month, on Sept. 23, he had been arrested again.

“How could he go back?” wife Corrine sobbed at their suburban Miami home. Corrine, who worked as a waitress to support their three children, ages 2, 3, and 5, said Young had told her he was going to New York on a business trip.

Young had been arrested with some two dozen former soldiers of former leader Fulgencio Batista. In a Dec. 2, 1959, news conference, President Dwight Eisenhower declined comment on Young’s trial except to say a consular official was monitoring it. On Dec. 8, the U.S. ambassador pleaded for clemency. That day, a Cuban military tribunal at the Pinar del Rio army headquarters sentenced Young to death by firing squad, but commuted that to 30 years in prison.

Young told reporters he’d prefer to be shot rather than serve the full sentence and that “the Castro government won’t last more than a few weeks.” That night, Young and a Cuban prisoner he knew as Oriente – later identified as Sergio Hernandez Reyes – used forks, jagged can tops and fingers to dig out of their cell and flee the prison.

“When the time came, only Oriente and I had the guts to squeeze through that hole,” Young later told Miami Herald reporter James Buchanan.

Afraid Young would bolt for sanctuary, the Cuban government placed armed guards at the U.S. embassy, which would shut down in November 1960 and remains closed today.

But Young had been hiding all along in the St. Johns Hotel in Vedado, a Havana suburb, using the alias Jack Morton. He’d made a collect call to a woman in Miami who tipped the Herald. Reporter James Buchanan came with the woman and interviewed Young in his hotel room.

“I won’t go back,” Young told Buchanan. But a short time later, betrayed by a waitress, Young was picked up by authorities. He’d been on the lam all of 36 hours.

The Cubans also nabbed Buchanan, who’d had time to air mail his story but had returned to Young’s hotel room with bandages for the escapee. The reporter spent 14 days in jail with Young, then was tossed out of the country. Young was sent to the marble quarries.

Back in Palm Beach, Young’s mother Hazel expressed relief at his capture and called his escape “a very foolish thing.”
In September 1962, as Young languished in a Cuban jail, his wife, Corrine, filed for divorce. She claimed their marriage of eight years had effectively ended when Young deserted her and their children to fight Castro.

In December 1962, Young’s brother-in-law wrote President Kennedy at his Palm Beach estate, asking he update his neighbors, Young’s “broken-hearted” parents. On Jan. 8, 1963, the State Department wrote Young’s parents to say Swiss diplomats talked with Young at the prison on the Isle of Pines, adding, “the Swiss found the prisoner’s condition much better than on their previous visit.”

On April 22, 1963, at Homestead Air Force Base, 21 prisoners stepped off a Pan Am flight from Havana. The swap was negotiated by William Donovan, a New York lawyer who’d also arranged the release of U2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers and more than 1,000 participants in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

Among those stepping back on U.S. soil – and into his father’s arms – was Austin Young Jr. He had been in prison for 3 1/2 years.

“He has aged 10 years in 42 months,” reporter Miami Herald James Buchanan wrote after greeting his old friend. Later that day, in his parents’ Palm Beach home, Young said that, except for getting caught, “I have no regrets, and would do the same thing all again.” Nine days later, Austin Young Sr. died at West Palm Beach’s Good Samaritan Hospital.

Later in his life, Young piloted a yacht belonging to the Holsum bakery company. He died July 12, 1978, of a respiratory infection. He was 57.

Originally published in four parts on July 7, 14, 21 and 28, 2004.

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